There's no indication that President Obama is a similar tippler, but I think it just means that the public's impatient, the public is worried, the public is lurching a little bit from side to side and saying, we'll take a chance on you.

As an interesting writer is by definition a pond-skipper, a book-dipper, perhaps a tippler and ever an eccentric, it's no surprise to find procrastination only a few letters away from (literary) procreation.

Meanwhile, Lynley, who's been away on compassionate leave following the murder of his wife (in the preceding novel), is summoned back to duty to guide his possible replacement, an attractive divorcee and closet tippler named Isabelle Ardery.

As always, Annette Bening is glorious -- there's a nervous intelligence that shines through (a quality you wouldn't often single out in American actresses), and in "Kids" Bening gets to strut her comedy skills playing a control freak and tippler.

Winston Churchill, a tippler of note and an orator of the first water who may never have been called out under the ban on the latter, himself tiptoed around the former by referring to an opponent's '' terminological inexactitude. ''